At last, art gets with the program

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Edinburgh is a wonderful city. Don't believe the words of a
certain English playwright who remarked that during the three weeks
of the Edinburgh International Festival the city did indeed become
the Athens of the North, and for the remaining 49 weeks it reverted
to being the Reykjavik of the South. True, things do quieten down a
bit after the intensity of more than six festivals - Official,
Fringe, Book, Jazz and Blues, Film, Television and the newly minted
Visual Art Festival - all running concurrently, but there is always
something happening, even for a Glasgow-born sceptic like myself.
So where do the visual arts fit into all this?

Because the official festival has always marketed itself as a
performing arts festival, the links to the visual arts have, until
recently, been tenuous. Sometimes exhibitions are listed at the
back of the program, sometimes not. There has also been
understandable reluctance in the past for the city's museum and
gallery curators to hand over their programming to a festival
director whose background will either be musical or theatrical. So
last year a pilot Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) was launched, and
this year it really kicks into gear. Tessa Jackson, who
co-ordinated the visual arts when Glasgow triumphed as European
Capital of Culture in 1990, is chairwoman of the steering committee
along with Fiona Bradley, director of the Fruitmarket Gallery, and
Amanda Catto, visual arts director at the Scottish Arts Council,
plus several other stakeholders in the city's visual arts scene.
"EAF will highlight the importance of the visual arts to
Edinburgh," says Jackson, "at a time when it stages one of the
world's foremost cultural events in August."

Catto agrees. "The success of last year's pilot demonstrated
that there is a real desire from artists, galleries and audiences
for an event such as this," she says.

So what are they offering?

The Royal Scottish Academy sits on Princes Street adjacent to
the Scott Monument, the world's largest tribute to a literary
figure, which towers above the city's department store roofs like a
neo-Gothic rocket. But it is a giant of the visual world who is
being celebrated within the RSA in an exhibition called Gauguin:
Vision of the Sermon. Built around the National Gallery of
Scotland's key work Vision after the Sermon (Jacob wrestling
with the Angel), an additional 90 paintings by Gauguin and many of
his famous contemporaries - Degas, Pissarro, Emile Bernard and
Maurice Denis - have been assembled along with furniture, costumes,
ceramics, and letters.

The Dean Gallery - which is, like all Edinburgh galleries,
within walking distance of any other one, so compact is this city
of half a million people - is hosting the UK's only showing of
photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson through more than 200 images
taken by this founding member of the legendary Magnum agency.

There is plenty of contemporary work, both home-grown and
international, to be seen this summer. Cai Guo-Qiang has a huge
reputation around the world for using that most Chinese of
inventions, fireworks, to create dazzling pyrotechnics.

The New York-based artist has created a show The Scottish
Supernatural at the Fruitmarket Gallery. The show includes nine
gunpowder drawings and a collaboration with author James Robertson
on a mix of Scottish and Chinese ghost stories, reminding us that
this is the city of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the Sherlock Holmes
stories really take place in Edinburgh settings transposed to
London), Jekyll and Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson) and Aleister
Crowley. But his major event took place on 29 July when he created
a special performance called Black Rainbow, exploding 2000
black smoke shells over Edinburgh Castle.

The great artist-poet-philosopher Ian Hamilton Finlay turns 80
this year. He is famed for his garden temple known as Little Sparta
in the wild Scottish moorlands. It is a meeting place for concrete
sculpture, French revolutionary ideas and piercingly profound
commentaries on everything from the sublime in nature to military
aggression versus the rights of the individual. His life is being
celebrated in three exhibitions, one of which (at Ingleby Gallery)
contains a new work based on a text by Jean-Jaques Rousseau.

Finlay works with nature unlike any other artist and, for this
exhibition, he has created a garden, heavy with symbolism and
studded with stone sculptures, around the gallery's ancient cherry
tree.

Glasgow-based Claire Barclay, who has previously exhibited in
Melbourne and Hobart, has made a site-specific sculpture at
doggerfisher gallery, and Portuguese artist Paula Rego is showing
at the Talbot Rice Art Gallery. This is a wonderful space once used
for medical demonstrations to young surgeons and beneath which lies
a tunnel (used by body snatchers to sell on to the surgeons) that
leads to the nearby Greyfriar's churchyard.

Just up the road, Edinburgh College of Art is showing the work
of Greek artist Jannis Kounellis, while Merz Gallery hosts 15
contemporary Japanese artists. The City Art Centre, opposite the
Fruitmarket Gallery, presents the work of 12 contemporary African
Artists in an exhibition called Looking Both Ways that has
been flown in from the Museum for African Art in New York.

Some of these exhibitions have been open for some time because
most museums and galleries like to mount shows that last for more
than the three weeks of the festival.

One of the biggest and best is the first museum exhibition
devoted to the portraits of Francis Bacon. It fills most of the
ground floor of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and has
been jointly staged with Hamburg Kunsthalle.

Many of the paintings I had never seen before, while others were
like revisiting anxious friends out of context. The very first work
in the exhibition Portrait, is from 1931 and is doubly rare
as this was a period when he was destroying much of his work. He
did not enjoy his first solo exhibition until 1949 at the Hanover
Gallery in London.

All his great sitters - many of them lovers - are here: Peter
Lacy, George Dyer, the Men in Blue series, Isabel Rawsthorne
(who also posed for Derain and Giacometti), Lucian Freud and
Henrietta Moraes. The exhibition is stunning and reaches several
crescendos on the way to the final portraits of sitters such as
Michel Leiris and John Edwards, Bacon's constant companion from
1971 until his death.

Edwards, who was Bacon's beneficiary, donated his entire studio
to the city of Dublin, where the artist was born.

A fascinating series of lectures is being held throughout the
run of this show, including one by Margarita Cappock on what we can
learn from Bacon's studio now placed within a museum context.

If you like visiting artist's studios - and I do very much -
when you are in Edinburgh you can visit the studio of Eduardo
Paolozzi, one of the city's famous sons and a leader of the British
Pop Art movement.

Many Italians settled in Scotland over the past century and a
large proportion have followed artistic careers (Leon Morocco, from
the great Morocco dynasty of Italian-Scottish artists, is also
exhibiting during the festival).

In 1994 Paolozzi gave a large amount of his work, and the entire
contents of his studio, to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern
Art and much of his great public sculpture is around the city.

When you go there, another treat awaits you.

Scotland's become one of the world centres for the study of Dada
and Surrealism thanks to two great collections that have been given
to the city or acquired through lottery funds.

One is the Penrose Collection and the other the Gabrielle
Keiller Collection. Between them they contain key works by
Magritte, Picasso, Ernst, de Chirico and Tanguy.

After Roland Penrose died, it took historian and archivist
Michael Sweeny 10 years to catalogue all the works in the
collection. Until 18 September, as well as these permanent
holdings, the gallery is showing Surrealism in Britain, which
revisits the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Royal
Academy in 1936. The exhibition was famously co-curated by Penrose,
the poet David Gascoyne and critic Herbert Read. Works by Eileen
Agar, Paul Nash, and Henry Moore are on display.

And if you want to end your visit on a more contemporary note,
Edinburgh - like Melbourne - has a dynamic range of artist-run
spaces. Go see, Aurora, Magnifitat, EmergeD, Total Kunst and The
Embassy.